The Weight of Mountains was founded because I lived between an Icelandic mountain laden with potent mytho-geography and the Greenland sea.

After hosting hundreds of artists beneath this mountain as the director of Nes Listamiðstöð Artist Residency, it became natural to investigate the relationship that artists hold to landscape as character, the performance of place, the poetic and human gaze, and notions of conduits channeling a site through evocation or intuition, ...And how does this happen in other global locations, too?

It has since become a rich film biennial, sculpted anew each time as a nomadic residency, a heterotopian frame, a dislocated reality, or a nomadic ship that positions itself as a recurring site-specific installation/ portal/ residency/ and long term durational experiment. Somewhat like Italo Calvino’s city of Ersilia and Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue, The Weight of Mountains is both a metaphor and an analogy and is in/visible as a roaming construct. We converge from all corners of the world within a structure; finding a doorway to enter a place with collaboration from those on the other side of that door.

Biennially, filmmakers are curated via an application process to form a loose and revolving collective who meet in a remote or uniquely challenging environment to make independent short film. TWOM collaborates with locals and art spaces around the world.